cellphone

It is essential to carry a cell phone with you when traveling to India. This lets you manage your time better and to stay in touch with your social and business associates in your home country and in India. In addition, services like directions, taxi, food, medical and police are easily accessible with your cell phone.

You can take your current US cell phone to India and just use it if it is enabled for International calling (contact your service provider to make sure). However it is sure to be expensive to use (a phone call between India and US may cost between $1.29 and $2.49 per minute).

There is an affordable alternative that can save you as much as 90% of the usage cost. You can use your US phone by replacing its SIM card serviced by a local operator. Your phone must be triband GSM and 'frequency unlocked' (contact your US service provider to find out). In case your US phone does not confirm to this, you can buy a handset (for as low as $25) and use a local SIM card with it.

There are numerous places to get a handset and a SIM card in Delhi. You will have to fill out a registration form, submit your picture and a copy of your passport and have a verifiable local address. It takes about 24 to 48 hours to activate your service after all requirements have been completed and approved.

Some of the service providers in India inlclude Vodafone, Airtel, Reliance, Idea, Tata Docomo.

You can take your current US cell phone to India and just use it if it is enabled for International calling (contact your service provider to make sure). However it is sure to be expensive to use (a phone call between India and US may cost between $1.29 and $2.49 per minute).

There is an affordable alternative that can save you as much as 90% of the usage cost. You can use your US phone by replacing its SIM card serviced by a local operator. Your phone must be triband GSM and ‘frequency unlocked’ (contact your US service provider to find out). In case your US phone does not confirm to this, you can buy a handset (a Micromax phone can cost as low as $20) and you can use a local SIM card with it. Preferred local service providers are airtel, reliance and vodafone and you can get a prepaid connection for the duration of your stay.

There are numerous places to get a handset and a SIM card in India starting from the Airport where you arrive in India. You will have to fill out a registration form, submit your picture and a copy of your passport and have a verifiable local address. It takes about 24 to 48 hours to activate your service after all requirements have been completed and approved. Make sure you carry ample photocopies of your passport and pictures from here as you might need them for administrative purpose.

Vonage World plan offers free unlimited calls to both landline and cell phone in India. One of the features that come with the World Plan is ‘call forwarding’ using which you can configure your assigned number to forward all your incoming calls to any number in India.

Especially for business people who have subscribed to Vonage, your clients not necessarily need to know that you are traveling out of the country and even if they do know they still can reach you without incurring any extra charges.

Three important things you should know before using this feature to forward calls to India:

India’s city code so that you can configure the India telephone number.

Neither landlines nor cellphones comes pre-configured with voicemail feature. So, your clients or family members won’t be able to leave a message. For cellphones you can call the Indian operator to set-up voicemail on your account.

The time difference between US and India is such that any calls coming to you in US day time will ring late at night in India.

One confusion that many foreigners whom I have met in India faces is when they make phone calls - using their cell phone and using a landline. This is because not only there is a difference in the number of digits in a cell phone as opposed to a landline in India, but what numbers to press before the actual 'telephone number' also differs when making a phone call using a cell phone and using a landline.

Here, I am taking an example to show you how to make phone calls when in India and also sharing a link to a site from where you can get the telephone code for any city in India.

Now lets say that you are in Delhi, whose telephone code is '011', and you want to call people who are in 1) Delhi, 2) any other city in India, and 3) international. Here, the assumption is that you are using a cell phone to make the call.